Creating a rake task desc "Description of what this task does" task :myraketask => :environment do .. .. end Once you have created a rake file(File with extension as .rake) and placed in /lib/task folder in your application.You can check rake -T for all the avaliable tasks, Your custom task will also be listed here with the description you have mentioned. So this is the general way of using your rake task. rake myraketask And if you wanted to pass any sort of arguments to your rake task , you can do this by rake myraketask foo=bar So the argument foo can be accessed by ENV['foo'] in your task.